The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Light test allows the flash-based SSDs to make the most of their write caching throughout the test, so even the 900p is surpassed by the Samsung NVMe SSDs while the 800p ranks with the budget NVMe drives. When the drives are full and the flash-based SSDs get bogged down with garbage collection, the 900p comes out ahead but the 800p still trails behind the Samsung 960 PRO. The VROC configuration look especially poor in terms of average data rate, and the RAID-5 performance is surprisingly low.
The Optane SSD 800p scores in the middle tier of SSDs for average latency on the Light test, and VROC RAID is no help here. VROC does help with the 99th percentile latencies, but without it the 800p looks like a low-end drive that merely doesn't have garbage collection problems.
The average read latencies from the 800p are almost twice as high as those from the 900p, and VROC's overhead only makes it worse. The average write latencies of the 900p aren't as good as the best flash-based SSDs, and the write latency of the 800p is well over twice that of the 900p.
The 99th percentile latency scores from the 800p are not great, but at least the drives perform just as well when full. Small flash-based drives are the most heavily affected when constant garbage collection becomes necessary.
The Light test is a fairly short run with any of these drives, but the 800p still manages to return extremely good power usage numbers that are well ahead of any flash-based NVMe SSD.
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Reflex - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
I'm sorry you know how many are rushing out to buy a product that isn't available yet? I don't personally expect large volumes since at the current capacities it isn't in the sweet spot for consumers in price/perf, but its offering solid performance that bests NAND in almost every consumer scenario, in some cases significantly while consuming less overall power. That's a win. As production ramps, costs will come down.And only the literacy challenged have chosen to read Intel's claims about 3DXPoint's potential as claims about its first generation products. Right now its constrained by a number of things beyond the memory itself, such as PCIe bus speed.
iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
And I am sorry don't possess common sense.Of course I am not talking about how the 800p sells, only a complete idiot could take this out of my comments. I am talking about the non-existent demand for it in the enterprise, which the introduction of the 800p is another testament to.
If intel was able to sell it at high enterprise margins they wouldn't be forcing it in the consumer world where it is pointless. Intel is not keep on losing money, and as overpriced as it is even as a consumer product, it is tremendously cheaper than what they can ask for it at the enterprise market. Instead they are marketing it to frigging games... which is 100% laughable.
And of course, I don't expect anyone save for silly fanboys with rich mommies to buy it in the consumer world. because it can offer absolutely nothing for the price premium it comes at. No intelligent human being would pick a 118 gb 800p to a decent 256 gb nvme or 512 gb ssd drive. None whatsoever.
Constrained by PCIe? It doesn't even come close to that. Neither in terms of bandwidth nor latency. But believe whatever it takes to reinforce your fake worldview.
Luckz - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Is there actually a point to 256 gb NVMe though? I mean, performance of the small 960 Evo sucks balls compared to the bigger ones. Why go NVMe when you can have a nice SATA drive with much more capacity and not even much worse perf?Adramtech - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
iter, Lehi fabs are 100% dedicated to Xpoint and no longer NAND. They wouldn't commit billions to that if they didn't have a path outlined for improvement and scaling.patrickjp93 - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Are you kidding? AWS Memcached, Lambda, and DynamoDB have their caching layers and indexing stored in Optane.eddman - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
We just found ddriver's long lost twin brother.Alexvrb - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Cloning tech gone wrong.Reflex - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
It's not his twin, it's just his new account. This place had a much better community during the too brief time he was gone.patrickjp93 - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
3DXP is being made on the 90nm node right now. What did you expect? It's a vastly cheaper research node for something so complex.And the performance is stunningly better than everything else Samsung has EXCEPT for high Queue Depth sequential performance. All real world testing shows the 960Pro getting smashed.
Reflex - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Didn't you hear the memo that because this first gen product isn't as good as the theoretical max performance discussed three years ago its all a big fail? /sarcasm